Evening Primrose I 24x18in Mounted + Framed Print

One morning last spring, I set out on a walk, camera in hand. With flowers as my subject, I was intent on refining my use of a photography technique I first tried years ago called freelensing. Freelensing is simply removing your lens from its mount on your camera and holding it in place while you shoot. Light leaks and tilt shift result from the gap between the lens and camera body, but when you flip the lens over so the back glass faces your subject, suddenly you have a zoomed in, macro view of the world around you.

This technique is incredibly hard to control. The depth of field (the amount of the image in focus) is minuscule and unchangeable. You have to move your body in millimeters to bring the desired subject into focus. It’s nearly impossible to get a sharp photograph. Creating an image this way is as much improvisation, luck, and dedication as skill and artistic vision. I loved it! The technique became a magical door into the dynamic, infinitesimal world around me. The painterly blurs combined with tiny spots of focus reflect the experience I had while shooting and connect me to the tradition of abstract expressionism, a movement in art that explored spontaneity, improvisation, and contemplative color.

I often like to imagine that my body, camera, and the world around me are a jazz trio, improvising together to create something new and beautiful from disparate parts. Focusing on the seasons, rhythms, and cycles of my environment helps me situate my bodily experience—often touched by chronic pain—within a greater dynamic world, and in that I find curiosity, comfort, and beauty.

I named this series Emergence to reflect the plants emerging from their winter slumbers and me, emerging into a new phase of my creative life. These images are also the first works where I began to experiment with layering multiple photographs together—a process that feels very much like painting—to tell a fuller visual story of the plant under investigation.

This series feels like my own wild garden, bursting from an energetic collaboration between my eyes, hands, camera, and nature herself. I hope this work inspires in you the same wonder and awe I feel when spending time in nature and reminds you to seek a deeper connection to the natural world every chance you get.